If you’ve been paying close attention to the worlds of politics, economics and horrific injustices, or if you’ve just been attempting to live in this country at this point in time under this particular government, you’ll have heard about this recession/depression/excuse to impose ideologically-driven cuts to services. The austerity programme that’s designed to turn the economy around while coincidentally satisfying many of the Tories’ ambitions on class warfare has seen some tremendous successes. Not economically, obviously – it’s a disaster by about every measure imaginable – but in screwing over poor people, vital services and basic hope. In our previous times together we’ve ranted about welfare cuts and how they’ll screw people, the bedroom tax and the little sense it makes and the rise of payday loans and the obvious exploitation they represent. For as long as there’s misery knocking about the rants will keep on coming.

Austerity isn’t working. Obviously it isn’t working. If it were working we’d see at least some sign of it working. What we’re seeing instead is sign after sign of it not working, and quote after quote from Cameron and Osborne saying they’ll stay the course as if we’re supposed to admire their stubbornness in the face of failure. This is two rich, privileged people screwing over the poor either because they want to or because they’re too afraid of saying “Oops”.

While the economy continues to do very little in the way of improving, one sector at least is thriving: food banks. This is what we’re resorting to to counter this assault on the poor. In Her Majesty’s United Kingdom of Great Britain and the British Isles and London, in one of the richest countries in the known world, in the age of iPads and botox, we have people begging at food banks to avoid starving to death or stealing to live. The Trussell Trust, which knows about these kinds of things, reckons there’s been a 76% rise in the number of food banks in the last year and a 170% rise in the numbers of people using them. They’re talking 346,992 people in the last year, just over a third of them children. Figures from 2009-10, from back before this government took over and started tearing strips off welfare, were at 40,898. That’s about a 750% increase in the lifetime of this government, this government that’s staying the course.

We should be ashamed of this. We should be ashamed we’re having to resort to this. We should be so angry about this we should be suffering losses of tens of millions of people to rage-related head explosions. We should be so embarrassed our collective blush should make the planets revolve around us thinking maybe we’re a new sun. And somewhere in there we should be maybe half proud people are putting these things together. Trussell, which likes a bit of Jesus but plays it down enough so’s you’d hardly know, reckons 30,000 donors and volunteers are helping out across the country, giving more than 3,400 tonnes of food last year. This is people seeing their communities struggling, pitching in as if poor people are fellow humans in need of a hand. It’s a decent thing they’re doing, even if it’s a lousy thing they’re being decent about, even if their decency shouldn’t be called on. And if Cameron tries to pass this off as The Big Society I’ll kick him square in the cock.

There’s a food bank opened up near us now, a couple minutes walk from social work. We had an email telling us how to use it when service users pitch up saying they’ve got no food for their children and no money to buy any. It’s getting harder to give them money now, with budgets getting tighter and destitution more in fashion thanks to the likes of the bedroom tax. Instead of getting money they’ll go to a needle exchange and ask for cans of beans so they don’t go hungry. It’s a new humiliation for people probably used to being humiliated.

Lousy as it is, it’s the Chazza of the Month. A few quid from me should buy a few cans of stuff; all non-perishable, though it won’t be lying around long. I’ll get a few cans of beans, a few cans of soup, maybe some pasta and some long-life milk. All veggie stuff, obviously. Shitty as this is I’m not above using it for a bit of social engineering.

In the Daily Mail view of the world, white men are an endangered species under attack from women the world over, lesbians in particular, atheists probably somehow and Europe almost certainly. Our only defenders against this tsunami of political correctness gone mad are Jeremy Clarkson with his blue jeans of justice and Nigel Farage with his tell-it-like-it-is pub loudmouth xenophobia. They are our last hope, our only holdouts in a world of womanholes and chairpeople and choirs of lesbians singing Baa Baa Minority Ethnic Origin Sheep. Without them, men would be doomed to perish in the raging fires of our daughters’ misguided bras.

Here at The Zero we like a bit of the old feminism. We like a bit of the world view that says woman is the [racial slur] of the world, that men have been running the place and doing it badly, that men as a group have been doing harm to women as a group since the two groups first got together and one beat hell out of the other and told it it couldn’t vote for about the next 100,000 years.

You can disagree, obviously. All you need to ignore is the sexualisation of women in the media, the difference in salaries for men and women doing the same job, the absence of female presidents and prime ministers, the odd bit of female genital mutilation, the sexual hypocrisy that says a man’s a player and a woman’s a slag, the varying acceptability of male and female nipple exposure, the lousy rates of female education in the developing world, and the history that says on our side education, suffrage, property and liberty have all been denied to women until about the last hundred years. Ignore that and more and your world view holds up pretty solid.

I carried mine into social work, into the domestic violence that features in literally every case I’ve worked. And that’s literally literally, not hyperbolic Facebook status literally. If you know your Zero you’ll recall how I’m working in a city with one of the highest rates of domestic violence in Europe, how I’ve been frustrated by the lack of prevention services for violent men. There are supports for women who’ve lived with these assholes; shelters for women who’ve run from the men doing them harm, safety planning for the women still with them, counselling for women who’ve survived their shit, counselling for children who saw it all, help for children who’ve begun to copy it. But men do this to women, and while the women are getting the support they need the men move on to other women and do the same to them and make more children see it all and maybe learn it for when their time comes.

I’ve got involved in a groupwork project that aims to do something about it, albeit with only half an eye on violence. It’s looking to take the lousy dads on the milder end of the violence spectrum and teach them how to be better parents, teach them how violence isn’t a part of it. It’s inspired by, as opposed to purchased from, an accredited programme that appears to work if you pick the right people. They’re the men who lack confidence in their parenting, men who think raising children is for women, men who are controlling and misogynistic and maybe violent but open to change of some sort. I’m not entirely sure how I feel about it.

Put the violence aside, I’m not even slightly interested in men as a special interest in need of particular attention. I’m embarrassed to be a male worker running a men’s group like it’s a passion of mine. I want to go more direct with violent men, give them a rant about patriarchy and the wrong they’re doing, get them to stop doing it. Logic and common sense and experience tell me that wouldn’t do much, and research from the programme says it wouldn’t do anything at all. Seems you have to approach the subject carefully, plant a few ideas about equity in relationships, about gentleness in childcare. You have to talk about how to put children first, how to be a considerate father, partner and ex-partner, how to respect children and women, how violence is the opposite of all that. And that’s a good thing. At the risk of sounding Daily Mail myself, there’s a clear problem of lousy, irresponsible men drinking their way through their children’s lives if they’re in them at all, beating hell out of their partners, staggering from job centre to jail. There aren’t many of them, they don’t number the army of shirkers the Tories dreamt up and there are reasons for them being how they are. But they’re around and something needs done. I’m just not sure it’s in me to stay away from the violence thing.

But in theory at least, if we can get in early before any major damage is done, if we can reshape even slightly their ideas of what it is to be a man and a partner and a father, if we can turn them onto responsibility and respectability and respectfulness maybe the children they raise won’t beat their partners and their generation will do better than ours and the seven million generations before us. And that’s why I’m currently in my Batman costume scaling the houses of parliament.

Devoted as you are to yer man The Zero, and as closely as you monitor my good works, you’ll be aware I do the odd bit of fundraising in spite of hating it almost completely. The past few years I’ve been meddling with Yaknak Projects, a small charity set up by a few friends to run two children’s home in Nepal. They need £16,000 a year to keep the homes running, a delightful spot of constant pressure that cheers them greatly.

I had a plan to change how they fundraised, to reduce the effort and up the ambition a bit. First, I wanted to change the kind of events we took on and the kind of money we aimed for, going for fewer events but doing them on a bigger scale and making them repeatable year on year. Second, I wanted to up the amount brought in by regular donors, aiming towards the all-of-it mark. Third, I wanted to get some decent chunks out of grants and trusts if the first two parts of the plan didn’t cover us.

A couple of years ago we started stage one, rounding up friends, friends of friends, co-workers and co-workers’ friends to run a 10k or half marathon. We had a team of 13 aiming for about £4,000, a figure almost stupidly ambitious against what we’d had before. We got about £7,500 once we counted Gift Aid. I can’t even tell you the level of smugness I was walking around with. I’m talking Gwyneth Paltrow.

Last year we started stage two, the regular donors thing. In the world of fundraising, regular donations are the joy of joys. You ask someone for money once and they keep giving it to you month after month, and all you’ve got to do check your bank statements to see if they’ve stopped. Back before we started on this we were getting a couple of hundred a month from the trustees and a friend or two but mostly when we encouraged people to give regularly they responded by not doing that at all. We changed how we went about asking, talking up the idea of being a small band of dedicated noble types helping to keep this small charity going. People started giving and got us up to £8,500 a year, more than half our running costs. At that point, by comparison, Gwyneth was looking modest, full of doubt and insecurities.

Last year brought us down a Paltrow or two. Rerunning the runs we had a lot of people who said they’d be up for it didn’t bother. We ended up with fewer runners and a lot less cash, coming out with about £3,500; a top-five fundraiser but disappointing against the first year. And there’s no Plan B with this stuff, there’s no one writing cheques if we don’t bring in the cash. It’s just us.

This week I got started on the third, hopefully still annual, big fundraiser. Here we’re looking to get people running again but also figuring ways to get lazier types to do something they’re at least halfway up for. So far we’ve nicked the idea of feeding yourself for a pound a day from whichever charity thought it up first, and added the Daal Bhat Challenge where, like a native Nepali, you have to eat curry and rice three times a day for a week. The trick is now to find people who can be bothered doing this and get them to do it, and find people who can’t be bothered and see if we can get them to do it too. The trick is then to find people who want to give us money and have them give it to us, and find people who want to keep their money and see if we can take at least a little from them.

There’s a brutal bit of maths here. We need £7,500. If we set a realistic average of £150 sponsorship per entrant, excluding Gift Aid, we need about 40 people. They’d put us to £6,000, with Gift Aid taking us to £7,500. We’ve got four trustees plus me who have basically no choice about doing this, and four people who’ve already signed to triathlons and half marathons. That leaves us with 31 people to recruit. We’ve got 13 people from the past two years we can ask, some of whom might be interested. That leaves us with a minimum of 18 new people to find. And we’re not the Race for Life, we can’t go putting up posters on subways or adverts on TV. This is ambitious for us. This is pressure. This is an assload of consequences just waiting.

The thing with fundraising is you have to dress it up like it’s fun. You have to be all positive and win people over with charm and enthusiasm and flattery. I have to put aside the panic and the maths that keeps me awake. Trying to get money from people, I tell them how much good it’s going to do. What keeps me awake is the opposite of that. It’s the absence of their money and the bad things its absence will do. If we don’t bring in this cash what’ll happen is we don’t pay rent on the boys’ houses and we don’t buy them food. We take them out of school and out of the houses and put them back in the orphanages they were living in before, in the orphanages where 150 children cram in together. We will fail them completely. We need to get this money.

That whooshing noise you just heard was the sound of my sphincter closing shut.